A GitHub issue filed Sept. 25 against OpenAI's Codex CLI reports that, since version 0.157.0, the tool installs a persistent background daemon by default without asking the user, according to the issue thread.
The daemon, launched as codex app-server --managed-daemon, keeps running after every CLI window closes until it is killed manually or the machine reboots, the issue says. It also copies a roughly 374-megabyte platform package into a separate directory, decoupling the daemon's version from the installed CLI, and checks for updates hourly, restarting itself and potentially interrupting active sessions.
Commenters on the issue, which has drawn more than 20 reactions, described the behavior as "unusable" and compared the covert persistence and self-updating to malware, citing undisclosed filesystem access and the daemon's habit of locking in the environment, including proxy settings, of whichever session started it first.
The reported workaround requires four separate commands: disabling the daemon_auto_start feature, stopping the daemon, killing its update loop process and deleting the cached package directory. No OpenAI maintainer response appears in the thread.
A command line tool that spawns a long running, self-updating background process without consent is a supply chain problem, not a convenience feature. Teams running Codex CLI on machines with shared credentials or proxy configuration should check whether the daemon is running before assuming session state is isolated.